Pegasus II will develop, from the output of the Pegasus project, a
common architecture and software environment in which general-purpose
multimedia applications may be produced. The solution proposed will
be appropriate for systems ranging through media file servers and
workstations, to ``set top boxes''. We expect the work to have
significant influence on future research in the area, and we have
commercial contacts who are exhibiting interest in Pegasus II .

Currently, both in the research environment and the commercial world,
there are many ad hoc, mono-application multimedia products;
however, just as the now ubiquitous personal computer replaced special
purpose systems for word-processing, database access, etc., the
current specialist multimedia systems must ultimately be replaced by
solutions based on a more generic platform. The commercial scope for
such a generic platform extends beyond the usual office environment
for PCs and workstations to the domestic market.

The project will improve and build upon the results of the original
Pegasus in a number of ways. Important among these are:

to extend the range of machines on which the Nemesis system will
be available (particularly with an eye to commercial potential), and
to extend the coverage of Nemesis-based services,

to provide a standard environment (e.g., ) to enable the
porting of current application software to Pegasus and a familiar
programming environment for new (non time-critical) applications,

to define and develop toolkits to provide the common scheduling,
synchronisation and manipulation functions for continuous media
needed by applications,

to design and construct a user interface to enable intuitive
interaction with the management of the network and workstation
resources.

The project views close relations with industry as key to its success:
the best system in the world is of little interest if it can never be
used. The project will therefore encourage partners to develop their
relationships with industry, specifically to maintain the targetting
of the project's work. It is believed, from contact with potential
commercial partners, that the project can provide second generation
solutions to multimedia processing problems on a
commercially-attractive timescale.